http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AM ... processors

Interesting and impressive if accurate esp an 8 core with a TDP of 95w.
On the other hand how are the 4 core ones the same?

Puzzling..

Still it's a bit more appealing to me as I avoided the 6 core Phenom II's as the TDP is a bit high for my tastes.
Price and performance have yet to be disclosed that of course will be a factor.

It's quite simple really: turn the speed down and you increase the efficiency (within some limits, but these CPUs are not close to that limit).
I know some people have been trying to BS their way around that but that's the way it is.

So an hexa-core with 95W TDP is nothing special. The latest Intel crop includes 45W quads (including the GPU's power consumption) for instance.
Underclock yourself and you can have an even lower maximum power consumption.

Maybe some of those CPUs burn more than 95W if you really push them but on the other hand I'd expect the slowest of the lot to consume less than 95W.

I thought an 8 core was quite impressive for 95w TDP we know AMD have been behind Intel in this game but I'm hopeful this can address the balance and deliver good performance with acceptable TDP's for quieter systems. I avoided the 6 core PH II because of the higher TDP (though some OEM ones were rated 95w at slower speeds)

I guess all we need now is performance and price

A slightly different list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fu ... _8-core.29

The link you gave has the oddity of saying that B2 stepping won't be released until 2012 but C0 will be released in 2011. Definitely something wrong with those steppings. Pretty common to see bad info on unreleased CPUs on Wikipedia and elsewhere though.

95W for 8 cores doesn`t sound particularly impressive if you take into account that each bulldozer core is relatively thin. Having said that, the llano chips (at least the ones used in laptops) made in the same process proved quite an improvement over amd`s existing lineup. I would certainly expect improved performance per watt compared to anything else amd has made so far, I don`t know if it will be enough to beat or match intel though.

The flagship model (that will probably go head-to-head with the 95W i7-2600K) is still 125W, though. Not really that impressive IMO, although AMD's next-gen CPUs seem to be more competitive with Intel in power consumption than Phenom II was. I've read that AMD has improved power gating a ton with both Llano and Bulldozer. Llano idle power, for example, is really good and BD is supposed to have even more improvements.

The i7-2600K is a quad core at 95w so erm I find 8 cores at a slightly slower clock speed quite decent overall. Yes some are slated at 125w for higher clock speeds which again isn't a huge shocker.

Evidently there have been some major improvements on power consumption which is good news because this put me off the 6 core and even 4 core higher clock Ph II's as well. If you consider the Ph II 955 is a quad core 3.2GHz 125w CPU and at least one FX 8 core is 95w it starts to look a lot more appealing to folks like me. I don't expect AMD to match Intel performance per core or clock speed but it should certainly be a notable improvement over the last one.

What you don't understand is that the Intels do more work per clock so an AMD which has the same clock and consumes less power is not necessarily more efficient. It depends on what you're doing exactly but, in general, Intel has a clearly superior technology. When you look at niches or at value, AMD CPUs can be a good buy but Intel's gear is generally more efficient.
So far as I know Intel doesn't make octo-cores CPUs for regular sockets yet but you probably have no use for an octo-core unless you want to maximize the efficiency of highly multi-threaded loads by underclocking. If that's what you want to do, you'd have to see if you can beat Intel's advantage by comparing underclocked CPUs. At stock speeds, I suspect Intel's 95W quad would come ahead at most tasks. But maybe not... we'll have to see.

edit: not hexa, octo!

The Bulldozer Architecture has some form of analog advanced power gating ~

The TDP of 125W then could probably never be reached in a 'real' world benchmark.

In a completely custom synthetic benchmark - maybe, its just an 'maximum' engineering number - and probably conservative at that.

Due to the massive complexity and weirdness caused by deep instruction pipelining and speculative execution/branching - it is no linger possible to say when/how many instructions execute per clock reliably.

Let alone a radically new/different (in x86 land) CPU design.

I await the final benchmarks, these will be the true test - and nothing else.